Well I got no rack unfortunately so space is a concern. Plus my gf is very sound sensitive. I would Der be looking at the used. Market for everything but the board probably. Although there is a 720 with cpus and 64gb ecc for 120 at my local pawn shop. But they have "no idea where it came from" which makes me nervous.

Yeah maybe that's why they caught my attention. Money is certainly an object but I'm willing to piece it together slowly over time. Pretty much can only spend a few hundred bucks at a given moment before I need to wait for either a paycheck or a great deal, and really can't justify dropping thousands on a setup, but I also don't want to cheap out. I have plenty of storage (24tb in 4tb enterprise drives and then another 10 or so handful of other 1tb) but nothing else yet. I have a couple great deals on large eatx cases with tons of drive Bays. Thinking I might as well go big if I have the space (also it seems more cost effective to go with the lff boards). And yes I was at least initially thinking a dual cpu setup would be ideal, but seems there are a lot of mixed feelings about that so im less sure on that tbh. Looked at xeons mostly, but I do see/hear the epycs are great. I'll do some research on what's in my price range there today. Thanks for replying btw!

I'd like to be able to use it functionally off the bat to backup and serve files mostly, but want something that I can slowly scale up to educate myself on/experiment with a wide array of things down the line. I assume there's no all in one option, but I'd like to make sure I have options. I'd like headroom for a bunch of self hosted services, to experiment with different OS and software and ultimately to learn how to create some tools of my own to help either with work (IT management for a small org) or just to have fun and mess around with. And like I said deep learning is endlessly interesting to me, but I think that's pretty far down the like atm.

Cool sounds dope man! Just making sure you knew, but sounds like you got a solid handle on it!

What else are you running on the server? Most would suggest not running certain other things on your pfsense unit, and some don't even thing running it as a VM is a good idea. Seems to be a big debate though so it's not necessarily cut and dry, but if you run a bunch of VMs alongside it just make sure you know how to keep everything stratified and protected.

Yeah it sounds pretty appealing. I think I'll make the switch when my bitwarden sub runs out

Smart ill get a other NAS to backup the NAS then.

Thanks man, I really appreciate it.

Any advice on the '0' in practice? What's the best way to ensure the files are free of error?

OK, thanks for the solid answer. I suppose the core of my question was that pretty much: is it just as secure AND a less likely target than bitwarden. That makes a lot of sense to me. I would probably still worry about the strength of the code , though. Do we know if/how it's been audited?